The Holy Cabala of Changes

Aries – Journal for the Study
of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

ARIES
brill.com/arie
The Holy Cabala of Changes

Jacob Böhme and Jewish Esotericism
Elliot R. Wolfson
University of California, Santa Barbara
ewolfson@religion.ucsb.edu
Abstract
This study examines affinities between kabbalah and Böhme’s theosophy. There are
hints in Böhme’s writings of an awareness of the esoteric dimension of Judaism,
regarding the mystical-magical power of the name. For Böhme, the Tetragrammaton
signifies the efflux of the Word, which through Wisdom, facilitates the transition from
infinite unity to finite multiplicity. The aspect of Böhme’s incarnational theosophy
most indebted to the kabbalah concerns the role of the imagination as the faculty
wherein the body of God is reflected as the anthropos in the sophianic mirror of nature.
Böhme’s speculation on the seven properties parallels what kabbalists aver regarding
the ten sefirotic potencies that collectively disclose the hidden essence of the infinite
in the attributes of lovingkindness on the right and judgment on the left of the Tree of
Life. Finally, the study assesses the conceptual correspondence between the desire of
the Ungrund in Böhme and the jouissance of the kabbalistic Ein Sof.
Keywords
Tetragrammaton – Ungrund – Ein Sof – sefirot – imagination – desire
…
Being absent of desire
we see the essence of the mystery.
Being full of desire
we see the boundaries of the manifestations.
dao de jing
∵
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700593-01801002
22 wolfson
Scholars have long noted the possibility of a vestige of kabbalistic ideas in

the thought of Jacob Böhme (1575–1624),1 although determining his sources
more specifically, whether textual or personal, has proven to be difficult.2 It
has been suggested that Böhme may have learned kabbalistic doctrines from
Judah Loew ben Bezalel, better known as the Maharal of Prague, during his
visit to Görlitz,3 an hypothesis that I find highly improbable given the Maharal’s
reluctance to expose esoteric doctrines openly even to his fellow coreligion-
ists. The most palpable conduits are works of Christian kabbalah,4 the writ-
1 Martensen, Jacob Boehme, 28; Schulze, ‘Jacob Boehme’; Scholem, Major Trends, 237–238;
Llewellyn, ‘Jacob Boehmes Kosmogonie’; Häussermann, ‘Theologia Emblematica’; Huber,
‘Die Kabbala;’ Aubrey, ‘The Influence of Jacob Boehme’, 16, 30, 36–37, 44–45, 281 n. 40, 291
n. 29, 295–296 n. 28; Benz, The Mystical Sources, 47–58; Janz, ‘Jacob Boehme’s Theory of
Knowledge’, 77–79, 194–195; Schulitz, Jakob Böhme; Weeks, Boehme, 30, 43, 106, 116, 147, 200,
204–205; Edel, ‘Kabbala’; idem, Die individuelle Substanz; idem, ‘Métaphysique’; O’Regan,
Gnostic Apocalypse, 193–209; Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Jakob Bohme’; Stoudt, Jacob Boehme, 22,
88, 89 n. 17, 96, 115; Rusterholz, ‘Elemente der Kabbala’; Kaennel, ‘Protestantisme et cabale’,
193–195; O’Donnell, ‘Böhme and Hegel’, 30–31; Boehme, Aurora, 43–44. See my own modest
contribution to this question in Wolfson, Language, 8, 197, 471 n. 435, 485–486 n. 180, and
references to other scholars cited on 423 n. 259 and 468 n. 392.
2 For a different portrait of Böhme’s intellectual background, see Gentzke, ‘Imagining’, 105
n. 13: ‘Many of Böhme’s key terms are rooted in previous discourses, such as Paracelsianism,
alchemical discourse, Hermeticism, and the German legacy of Christian mysticism’. This
description reinforces the labelling of Böhme by Hegel as the “first German philosopher”
because the content of his philosophizing is “genuinely German”. See Hegel, Vorlesungen, 94;
Lectures, 3:191. The intent of this classification is made clear in a second passage (Vorlesungen,
96; Lectures, 193) where Hegel describes Böhme as possessing a ‘solid, deep, German mind
which has intercourse with what is most inward’, and thus ‘exercises an immense power and
force in order to make use of actuality as Notion’. From Hegel’s standpoint, however, this is a
liability, since Böhme could not find ‘an adequate representation’ to convey the ‘speculative
thought’ latent in his writings (Vorlesungen, 97; Lectures, 195). The crudeness of his thinking
relates to his utilization of concrete and tangible images to express the abstract, and it is for
this reason that Hegel labels Böhme a “complete barbarian” (Vorlesungen, 92; Lectures, 189).
See Muratori, The First German Philosopher, 248–250. See also Haldane, ‘Jacob Böhme,’ 148–
150; O’Donnell, ‘Böhme and Hegel,’ 52–53; Dourley, Jung, 115. The omission of the kabbalah
as an influence on Böhme is all the more disconcerting since Gentzke’s main thesis regarding
the textual and visual performance of the Böhmean notion of the image betrays a striking
phenomenological affinity to what may be elicited from the Jewish esoteric material, as I have
argued in many of my studies, beginning with Wolfson, Through a Speculum.
3 Weeks, Boehme, 43.
4 On the relationship between Böhme and Christian kabbalah, see Weeks, Boehme, 205;
Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘The Christian Kabbala’; idem, Philosophia Perennis, 117–128, 187–192;
Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

the holy cabala of changes 23
ings of Paracelsus,5 and perhaps Jewish mystical teachings received orally from
Balthasar Walter, an acquaintance of Böhme and fellow traveler.6 While one
might object to Hegel’s characterization of Böhme’s philosophy as “barbarous”,
insofar as the presentation of the ideas he promulgated, notwithstanding their
individual profundity, methodologically lacked systematic order or thematic
cohesion,7 this criticism applies to the intermittent use he made of the kab-
balah. Ironically, Hegel’s further contention that Böhme did not possess the
pertinent verbal means to express speculative truth, which led him to use sen-
suous or imagistic terms to describe abstract concepts,8 can be justly attributed
to the kabbalists themselves; that is, one is struck by the preponderant use that
kabbalists have made of corporeal images—and especially the imaginal con-
stitution of the divine as a human form, the macroanthropos or the primal
Adam, which is also identified as the Tetragrammaton, the mystical essence
of the Torah—to depict the spiritual potencies that reveal the inherently con-
cealed light of the infinite. In the visionary thinking of the kabbalist, attested
in Böhme, words express the inexpressible and images disclose the imageless.9
Mystery of the Tetragrammaton and the Powers of God
I will commence my examination by taking stock of the occasional hints in

Böhme’s writings that suggest he was aware of the esoteric dimension of Juda-
ism. I will begin with the preface to the Clavis (1624). In the context of dis-
cussing the difficulty to communicate natural things linguistically, Böhme re-
marks: ‘Also the wise Heathens and Jews have hid the deep Ground of Nature
under such Words, as having well understood that the Knowledge of Nature is
not for every one, but it belongs to those only, whom God by Nature has chosen
for it’.10 In the continuation, Böhme challenges the nexus between esotericism
and apophaticism that he ascribes to the Heathen and the Jew, in their attempt
Penman, ‘Boehme’s Intellectual Networks’, 66–71. For a dissenting view, see Faivre, Theos-
ophy, 7.
5 This channel of influence was already noted by Hegel, Vorlesungen, 94; Lectures, 3:191. See
Muratori, The First German Philosopher, 42–56, 222–228; Gilly, ‘Das Bekenntnis’, 404–409.
6 Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme, 96; Weeks, Boehme, 30; Penman, ‘A Second Christian
Rosenkreuz’.
7 Hegel, Vorlesungen, 94, 98; Lectures, 3:191–192, 195–196.
8 Hegel, Vorlesungen, 95; Lectures, 3:192–193.
9 Wolfson, Language, 190–260.
10 Boehme, The Key, 17; Sämtliche Schriften, 9:77.

24 wolfson
to conceal the knowledge of nature, by noting that ‘when God reveals his Mys-
teries to any Man, he then also brings him into a Mind and Capacity how to
express them, as God knows to be most necessary and profitable in every Age’.11
This passage is somewhat inconsistent with other passages in Böhme’s oeuvre
where he upholds the apophatic and draws a connection between humility and
learned ignorance.12 Be that as it may, what is most important for our purposes
is to underscore that in the aforecited passage Böhme displays awareness of
the critical role of esoteric wisdom in the Jewish tradition, even though it is
cast polemically.13
Significantly, in the same work, reference is made to the following rabbinic
tradition concerning the Tetragrammaton:
The Ancient Rabins among the Jews have partly understood it, for they
have said, that this Name is the Highest, and most Holy Name of God;
by which they understand the working Deity in Sense: and it is true, for in
this working sense lies the true life of all things in Time and Eternity, in the
Ground [Grund] and Abyss [Ungrund]; and it is God himself, namely the
Divine working Perceptibility [Empfindlichkeit], Sensation [Findlichkeit],
Invention, Science [Wissenschaft],14 and Love [Liebe]; that is, the true
understanding in the working unity, from which the five senses of the

12 See, for example, De Æquanimitate oder Von der wahren Gelassenheit (1622), one of the
texts included in the collection Der Weg zu Christo, in Sämtliche Schriften, 4:91; The Way to
Christ, 119–120.
13 It behooves me to note that in spite of Böhme’s attraction to and appropriation of kab-
balistic theosophy, one can discover scattered in his published work negative comments
about Judaism. For example, see Boehme, Aurora, 131, 163, 263, 319, 321, 323, 325, 661, 663. In
one notable passage, Böhme insists that Christian, Jew, Turk, and Heathen are all equally
capable of overcoming the pernicious effect of the devil (Aurora, 383), but the ostensible
egalitarianism does not alleviate the derogatory comments that distinguish the Christian
from the other three types of human beings. Compare the ridicule of the Jewish dietary
law in Jacob Boehme, The High and Deep Searching, 224–225; Sämtliche Schriften, 3:147.
See ibid., 239, where the Pharisees are labeled the ‘ministers of the dragon,’ who pretended
deceitfully to be the ‘ministers of God’. The example of Böhme proves that it is possible
for a thinker to be influenced, directly or indirectly, by a tradition, while at the same time
maligning the people who sociologically uphold that tradition.
14 In the 1647 translation of John Sparrow, The Clavis or Key, or An Exposition of Some
Principall Matters, and Words in the Writings of Jacob Behmen, printed in The Works of
Jacob Behmen, 2:7, there is a marginal note ‘finding knowledge’, which is added because
the expression “invention, science” translates the one word Wissenschaft.

true Life spring. Each Letter in this Name intimates to us a peculiar virtue
[Kraft] and working [Wirckung], that is, a Form in the working Power.15
Just as the kabbalists link the sefirotic potencies to the letters of the Tetra-
grammaton, Böhme postulates that each letter alludes to a different working
power of the divine. Collectively, these powers relate to the attributes allied
with the Ground or the Abyss—Perceptibility, Sensation, Science, and Love—
which functionally parallel the role of the sefirot in relation to Ein Sof. In the
continuation of the passage, Böhme identifies in more detail the characteristics
correlated with the various letters of the name: j is the effluence of the Eternal
indivisible unity; e is the threefold I, the Trinity comprised within the unity; h is
the Word that comes forth from the breathing of the Trinity; o is the circumfer-
ence or the Son of God, who speaks from the compressed Delight of the Power
and Virtue; v is the joyful effluence of the breathing, the proceeding of the Spirit
of God; and a is the Wisdom that issues from the power and virtue, the place
wherein the Trinity is manifest.16 It is likely that Böhme began his explication by
saying the Jews have only ‘partly understood it’ because the rabbis did not dis-
cern the trinitarian implications of the name. Summarizing his Christological
interpretation, Böhme notes, ‘This Name is nothing else but a speaking forth
[Aussprechen] … of the Threefold working of the Holy Trinity in the unity of
God. Read further of this in the Explanation of the Table of the three Principles
of the Divine Manifestation’.17 The kabbalistic underpinning here is evident:
the Tetragrammaton manifests the unmanifest in the form of the ten divine
potencies arrayed in the triadic division of the right, left, and central columns
of the Tree of Life. In Böhme’s appropriation, the name of the nameless is the
speaking forth of the unity of God that assumes the form of the Trinity.
The bibliographical instruction offered to the reader at the end of the pas-
sage is a reference to Tabulae principiorum (1624). In that treatise, Böhme aug-
ments his Christian adaptation of the kabbalistic tradition in the description
of the table marked by the Tetragrammaton:
In this Table is considered the Efflux [der Ausfluss] of the eternal divine
word, how the word through Wisdom, brings itself from Unity [Einheit]
into Separation [Schiedlichkeit] and Multiplicity [Vielfältigung], as well as
in the eternal Nature and Creature, according to which, God calls himself
15 Boehme, The Key, 22; Sämtliche Schriften, 9:81–82.

16 Boehme, The Key, 22–23; Sämtliche Schriften, 9:82.

26 wolfson
an angry, jealous God, and a consuming Fire, as well as a merciful God,

wherein is understood, the Foundation of Angels and Souls, and how they
may receive Salvation or Damnation.18
I will return in the next section to the dual deportment of the divine as merciful
and wrathful. What needs to be emphasized here is the kabbalistic resonance
of Böhme’s assertion that the Tetragrammaton signifies the efflux of the Word,
which through Wisdom facilitates the transition from the indiscriminate unity
of the infinite to the discriminate multiplicity of finite nature. Elucidating the
implications of his Christological appropriation of the Jewish esoteric doctrine,
Böhme writes in a second passage from this work:
In this Table is also manifested, how the holy Name of the eternal Power,
with the Knowledge hereof, from Eternity to Eternity, brings itself into
Properties in Nature, to eternal Light and Darkness, and how the Word of
Breathing forth brings itself into a Subject, and how Self-will and Accep-
tation of Properties arise in the Subject, wherein two Essences are always
understood as God’s own Effluence, and then the Properties own Accep-
tation in the Free-Will, in which Acceptation, another external Kind of
Subject is understood, whereby the Unity, in its Effluence, becomes more
external, and thereby the eternal Love brings itself into a Sensibility, and
like fiery Flame, as in the Working of divine Power.19
The more specific influence of the Christian kabbalistic understanding of the

Tetragrammaton and its relationship to Jesus seems to be at play as well in the
following passage from Böhme’s De electione gratiae (1623): ‘From eternity the
name Jesus lay in man, viz. in the likeness [Gleichnis] of God, in an immovable
love. … Adam before his fall had the divine light from Jehovah, that is, from the
one God in which the high name Jesus stood hidden. Not that it was concealed
in God, but in the creature, that is to say, in the attraction to the creature’.20 The
18 Jacob Böhme, Four Tables of Divine Revelation, in The Works of Jacob Behmen, 3:9; Sämtliche
Schriften, 9:62. On the anthropomorphic characterization of the language of God as allud-
ing to ‘a Great Secret’ (ein Groß geheimnis), see Boehme, Aurora, 536–537, and the sum-
mation on 538–539: ‘But God’s word, which he spoke then in terms of force, encompassed
heavens and earth and the heaven of all heavens, indeed the entire divinity [Gottheit]
itself’.
19 Böhme, Four Tables, 3:11; Sämtliche Schriften, 9:62.
20 Boehme, De Electione Gratiae and Quaestiones Theosophicae, 107–108; Sämtliche Schriften,
6:88. On Böhme and the Christian kabbalah, see references above, n. 4.

idea that the name of Jesus was secreted in the aspect of God marked as the
attraction to the creature, that is, the potency of the infinite to become finite,
corresponds to the kabbalistic doctrine of the name hidden in the nameless,
the potential of the limitless to become limited, as the imageless is constellated
into the image of the incarnate word.
The kabbalah is invoked overtly by Böhme in the Quaestiones Theosophicae
(1624). The specific reference is to the magical power of the Tetragrammaton
and the need to conceal it from the unworthy. In his description of the sixth
property of the emanated will, which is identified, inter alia, with the qualities
of sound (Hall), tone (Schall), understanding (Verständnis), speech (Rede), and
distinction (Unterscheiden), or the true understanding (der wahre Verstand),
Böhme writes:
In this sixth property [Eigenschaft] stand the holy names, that is, the
Divine powers in the opening of the Unity, in the working and willing.
And they stand in the two fires at the same time, viz. in the fire of
natural motion and in the fire of the flame of love. And here we have
the wonder-working Word in its operation. For the great name of God
tetragrammaton (JeHoVaH) is here the centre of the wonders of God,
and it works in both the central fires. This name the evil spirits, in their
transmutation according to the centre of the fire’s nature, do misuse.
And the ground of all cabala and magic [der Grund der ganzen Cabbala
und Magie] is contained in this principle, these being the active powers
whereby the imperceptible co-works in the perceptible. And here the law
of Moses forbids misusing this principle on pain of eternal punishment,
as may be seen in the ten commandments. For our fellow allies enough
has been said, and for the godless [Gottlosen] a strong bar lies before it.21
Once again, the influence of kabbalistic theosophy is readily apparent in the

identification of the holy names as divine powers (die Göttlichen Kräfte) related
to the opening of the unity (Aufthun der Einheit); that is, the proliferation of
the one into the many through the incitement of the infinite will, or as Böhme
puts it, the powers by which the imperceptible is activated in the percepti-
ble (das Unempfindliche in dem Empfindlichen mitwirket). The fragmentation of
that unity into a plurality is connected both to the Word, which acts in the fire of
love and in the fire of nature, and to the Tetragrammaton, the ground of all kab-
21 Boehme, De Electione Gratiae and Quaestiones Theosophicae, 286–287 (translation slightly

modified); Sämtliche Schriften, 9:12–13.

28 wolfson
balah and magic. From Böhme’s perspective these are indistinguishable, and
hence even the theosophical components, which he adopts from Jewish eso-
tericism, are contextualized within a magical framework. This may also explain
Böhme’s embrace of the locution ‘Deep hidden Magia of God’ (der tiefen verbor-
genen Magia Gottes) to refer to the eternal wisdom.22 The magia of God is the
arcanum or the mysterium that denotes knowledge of the supernatural but also
the spiritual potency in virtue of which dreams are configured as the appear-
ance that becomes as the reality that is apparent,23 the ‘mother of eternity’ that
is the ‘great mystery’ of the will that ‘brings itself by the imagination of the
desireful hunger into being. It is the original state of Nature. Its desire makes an
imagination [Einbildung], and imagination … is only the will of desire’.24 I shall
return to the matter of desire below, but suffice it here to note that, for Böhme,
the apposition of kabbalah and magic underscores the imaginal potency of the
former by means of which the immaterial is materialized.
Incarnation, Angelic Body, and the Sophianic Mirror

of Imagination
Hegel already suggested that Böhme’s speculation on the first man and Christ
bears affinity with the kabbalistic doctrine of Adam Qadmon and the Neopla-
tonic Logos.25 In my estimation, the aspect of Böhme’s incarnational theoso-
phy that is most indebted to the kabbalah concerns the role he assigns to the
imagination as the faculty wherein and whereby the body of God—the divine
flesh (die Göttliche Fleisch)26—is reflected and refracted as the image of an
anthropos in the speculum of divine wisdom, the sophianic mirror of nature.27
Support for this conjecture may be culled from the following comment in the
Clavis:
The Wisdom is the Great Mystery of the Divine Nature; for in her, the
Powers, Colours, and Virtues are made manifest; in her is the variation of
22 Böhme, The Treatise of the Incarnation, in The Works of Jacob Behmen, 2:19; Sämtliche
Schriften, 4:10. On the terms magia and magus in Böhme’s writings, see the introduction
of Weeks in Boehme, Aurora, 57–58.
23 Böhme, Forty Questions, in The Works of Jacob Behmen, 2:87; Sämtliche Schriften, 3:130.
24 Böhme, Six Mystical Points, in Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 131; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:93.
25 Muratori, The First German Philosopher, 279.
26 Böhme, Six Mystical Points, 133; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:94.
27 Faivre, Theosophy, 138–143.

the power and virtue, namely the understanding: she is the Divine under-
standing, that is, the Divine vision [Beschaulichkeit], wherein the Unity
is manifest. She is the true Divine Chaos, wherein all things lie, namely
a Divine Imagination, in which the Ideas of Angels and Souls have been
seen from Eternity, in a Divine Type and Resemblance [Ebenbildniss]; yet
not then as Creatures, but in resemblance [Gegenwurf ], as when a man
beholds his face in a Glass [Spiegel]: therefore the Angelical and human
Idea flowed from the wisdom, and was formed into an Image [Bilde], as
Moses says, God created Man in his Image, that is, he created the body, and
breathed into it the breath of the Divine Effluence, of Divine Knowledge,
from all the Three Principles of the Divine Manifestation.28
A similar theme is noted in the reference to the kabbalah in a second passage

from the Quaestiones Theosophicae:
For what the angels will and desire is by their imagination brought into
shape and forms [das wird durch ihre Imaginirung in Bildung und For-
men gebracht], which forms are pure ideas [eitel Ideen]. In manner as
the Divine powers have shaped themselves into such ideas before the
creation of the angels, so is their after-modelling [Nachmodelung]. And
herein lies the holy cabala of changes [die heilige Cabbala der Veränderun-
gen], and the great kingdom of joy [die grosse Freudenreich], in which the
Divine wisdom and knowledge is fashioned and shaped by the spirits of
the central fire and light. And there is such a joy of cognition therein, that
for great joy and knowledge they bow and humble themselves eternally
before such majesty, that the No [das Nein] may not get the dominion in
them, and they be deprived of such glory.29
Through the imagination the angels bring their desires into the form of pure
ideas. The process is called “after-modeling”,30 since it mimics the personifi-
28 Boehme, The Key, 23–24 (emphasis in original); Sämtliche Schriften, 9:82–83. The word
Gegenwurf, translated as “resemblance,” literally denotes opposition. To say that creation
is the image in which God is beheld implies that, as the reflection in the mirror, it is a
counter-force, the locus of alterity, and hence it is analogous to Böhme’s idea of the contra-
will (Wiederwille).
29 Boehme, De Electione Gratiae and Quaestiones Theosophicae, 298–299; Sämtliche Schriften,
9:21.
30 On the Boehmian idea of the after-modeling of the angelic world, see Peip, Jakob Böhme,
45, and sources cited there in n. 2.

30 wolfson
cation of the divine powers. Curiously, Böhme glosses this process with the
declaration herein lies the holy cabala of changes. I am not familiar with any
other source (Jewish or Christian) that utilizes this expression, but from the
context it can be assumed that the intent is to demarcate the metamorphosis
of the divine powers into angelic forms that collectively constitute the “great
kingdom of joy” in which the divine wisdom and knowledge are molded into
an image by the spirits of fire and light. As Böhme put it in an earlier treatise,
De Incarnatione Verbi (1620):
And so the Image [Bildniss] of Angels and Men have been from Eter-
nity discovered in the Divine property in God’s wisdom, as also, in the
property of the fierce wrath, the Devil has been, but not in the holy Light-
flaming property. But yet in no Image [Bilde], or Being [Wesen], but in the
Way [Art], as in a deep sense, a thought darts up, and is brought before
its own Looking-Glass of the Mind [Spigel des Gemüths], where in the
Mind often a thing appears, that is not in Being. Thus have the two Gen-
etrixes [Gebärerin], viz the fierce wrath in the Fire, and also the Love in
the Meekness or Light, set their Model in the wisdom. Where then the
Heart of God in the Love has longed to Create this Model into an Angeli-
cal Image, out of the Divine substantiality [aus Göttlicher Wesenheit], that
it should be a Similitude and Image of the Deity [Gleichniss und Bilde
der Gottheit], and should dwell in the wisdom of God, to fulfill the long-
ing of the Deity, and to the Eternal rejoicing of the Divine Kingdom of
Joy.31
Discernible in Böhme’s kingdom of joy is an echo of the kabbalistic symbol of

Malkhut, which is also closely affiliated with the imaginal realm of surrounding
angels, embodied in the form of the glorious angel, or the angel of glory,
sometimes identified as Metatron, sar ha-panim, decoded hyperliterally as the
archon of the faces, that is, the angel that displays the double countenance of
judgment and mercy.32
31 Böhme, The Treatise of the Incarnation, in The Works of Jacob Behmen, 2:19 (emphasis in
original); Sämtliche Schriften, 4:10–11. I have slightly modified the translation.
32 Regarding the identification of Shekhinah as the glorious angel, or Metatron, see Wolf-
son, Through a Speculum, 184 n. 247, 223–226, 256, 258, 261–263, 313 n. 162, 334. On the
attribution of the divine attributes of judgment and mercy to the twofold nature of Shekhi-
nah and Metatron, see Wolfson, op. cit., 310 n. 147. For the appropriation of this doctrine
in Abulafia’s prophetic kabbalah, see Wolfson, ‘Kenotic Overflow’, 147–150; idem, ‘Textual
Flesh’, 212–217.

Moreover, as the kabbalists universally applied to the sefirot the dictum of

Sefer Yeṣirah that ‘their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in
their end’,33 so Böhme writes in the Aurora, Morgen Röte im auffgang (1612)
about the divine powers, which jointly constitute the kingdom of joy, that ‘the
last gives birth to the first, as well as the first to the last’.34 In the manner
that the Godhead is without beginning or end, so the potencies must be seen
sub specie aeternitatis.35 As Böhme puts it in another passage from this trea-
tise with respect to the idea of the seven spirits (die Siben Geister) or divine
forces (der Götlichen krefften), the seven properties (Eigenschaften) that make
up the eternal nature of God’s body, also identified as the princes of angels
(die Fürsten der Engel) that correspond to the seven planetary spheres,36 ‘All
seven spirits are born in one another, each perpetually giving birth to the other.
None is the first nor is any the last, for the last generates the first, as the first
the second, third, fourth, to the end. … For all seven are equally eternal and
none has a beginning or an end’.37 Reiterating this crucial theosophic point
in the Clavis, Böhme writes, ‘Now these are the seven properties in one only
ground; and all seven are equally eternal without beginning; none of them
can be accounted the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or last; for they
are equally eternal without beginning, and have also one eternal beginning
from the Unity of God’.38 Analogously, the sefirotic gradations are generated
in such a way that a linear or hierarchical order is disrupted; kabbalists would
surely assent to Böhme’s allegation that each one of the seven properties is dis-
tinctive and yet part of an indivisible whole, exceptional and yet interchange-
able.39
In a description of the seven properties from the Mysterium Magnum (1623),
the kabbalistic reverberation is even more pronounced:
All seven are but as one; and none is the first, second or last; for the last
is again the first. As the first introduceth itself into a spiritual essence,
even so the last introduceth itself into a corporeal essence; the last is the
body of the first. We must speak thus in part, in order to write it down
33 Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, § 6, 74.

34 Boehme, Aurora, 690–691.
35 Gibbons, Gender, 91.
36 Boehme, Aurora, 152–153. See ibid., 232–233, 236–237. Böhme’s seven spirits of God were
compared to the kabbalistic sefirot by Aubrey, ‘The Influence’, 44–45.

32 wolfson
and present it to the sense for the consideration of the Reader: the seven
forms are altogether only the manifestation of God, according to love and
anger, eternity and time.40
It is not uncommon for kabbalists to divide the divine realm into the upper
three emanations and the lower seven. Böhme, I suggest, obfuscated this dis-
tinction and viewed divinity as being constituted by seven qualities that are
also manifest in creation.41 What Böhme attributes to the seven properties is
parallel to what kabbalists aver with regard to the ten sefirotic potencies that
collectively disclose the hidden essence of the infinite in the two attributes of
lovingkindness on the right and judgment on the left. Particularly relevant is
Böhme’s portrayal of the emanation of the seven source-spirits42 as moving
from the spiritual essence of the first to the corporeal essence of the last to
the point that the last is considered to be the embodiment of the spirit of the
first. The kabbalistic pleroma similarly is depicted Neoplatonically as a grad-
ual condensation of the light from the spiritual to the corporeal. However, like
Böhme, the kabbalists reverse the order such that the first is the last and the last
the first. In kabbalistic parlance, the tenth and lowest of the sefirot, Malkhut, is
elevated to the status of the first and highest, Keter, and their ontological jux-
taposition is captured in the grammatical construct keter malkhut, the crown
of kingship, the former symbolic of and therefore subservient to the latter.
The two predominant geometric arrangements of the divine potencies in
kabbalistic literature are the linear or hierarchical, the so-called tree of the
emanations (ilan ha-sefirot), and the ten concentric circles whose nucleus is
the light of the infinite. In a pattern strikingly similar to the second of these
options, Böhme compares the seven spirits of God to seven wheels, which are
positioned within the other, so that in all seven there could be motion
forward and backward and crosswise without any reversal. … And the
seven would perpetually give birth or impetus to the hub in the middle
by their revolution so that the hub would always freely stand still without
alteration, whether the wheels moved forward or backward or sideways,
upward or downward. … Now the wheel has seven wheels in one another,
40 Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 33–34; Sämtliche Schriften, 7:34.

41 Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 38; Sämtliche Schriften, 7:39. Compare Boehme, Aurora,
280–281. And see Martensen, Jacob Boehme, 74: ‘Böhme agrees with the Kabbala, which
asserts in God seven Natural Properties, the last of which is the Kingdom (Malkuth)’. See
ibid., 192.

and a single hub which attaches to all seven wheels. All seven move on
the same axis. Thus God is a unitary God with seven spirits within one
another, with one always generating the others; yet all are but a single
God, just as all seven wheels are one wheel.43
Correlating his kabbalistically-inflected theosophy with the Christian doctrine

of the triunity of the divine, Böhme notes that the seven wheels symbolize
the seven spirits of the Father, the hub, which is the heart or innermost cor-
pus, signifies the Son, and the spokes that emanate from the hub represent
the Holy Spirit.44 Comparable to the gnosis of the kabbalah, there is no con-
flict in Böhme between the oneness of God and positing multiple sefirotic
potencies—the unity is constituted by the manifold that is nature. As Böhme
writes in the Aurora, ‘It is only in the Holy Spirit which is in God, and indeed
only in the whole of nature from which all things have arisen, that you can
search into the entire body of God which is nature, and indeed into the Holy
Trinity itself. For the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Holy Trinity. It prevails in
the entire body of God, that is, in All of Nature’.45
Böhme’s view has been classified by scholars as a form of pantheism or
panentheism, but it is not obvious to me that either of these words satisfac-
torily captures the import of his view that nature is the body of God. Closer to
the cadence of his thought is the cosmological view that may be elicited from
kabbalistic sources based on the supposition that all that exists in the world
is a disclosure of the light of the infinite, but insofar as that light is hidden,
in each and every disclosure there is an occlusion, an idea that conceptually
is parallel to the Neoplatonic view that each stage in the procession from the
originative monad is simultaneously a receding, and hence the whole of the
emanation can be characterized by diminishing degrees of perfection and like-
ness to the One, that is, a devolution from similarity to dissimilarity.46 Scholem,
43 Ibid., 394–399.
44 Ibid., 396–399. On the seven spirits in the wheel, see Martin, ‘Schöpfung’, 87–93. I am
grateful to the author for drawing my attention to her essay.
46 Proclus, The Elements, 60–61 (prop. 64). In the technical language used by Proclus, op. cit.,
62–63: ‘But all procession advances through similars [ὁμοίων] until it reaches the wholly
dissimilar [ἀνομοίων]’. The matter is elaborated in slightly different terminology in Pro-
clus, Commentary, 34–35. See ibid., 34 n. 22, where mention is made of the concept of
the similarity of dissimilarity or the similitude of dissimilitude (ἀνόμοιος ὁμοιότης) in Pro-
clus’s Platonic Theology, i.12. See Proclus, Théologie Platonicienne, 1:57. On the oxymoron
ἀνόμοιον ὁμοιότητα, see the supplementary notes in Proclus, Théologie Platonicienne, 1:144–

34 wolfson
no doubt influenced by an articulation of this sort, emphasized that the incep-

tual ṣimṣum, the withdrawal of the infinite from itself to create a space within
itself devoid of itself, is not a one-time event but rather constantly repeats
itself,47 the dialectic of bestowing and withholding that corresponds to the ‘two
tendencies of perpetual ebb and flow’, which ‘continue to act and react upon
each other. Just as the human organism exists through the double process of
inhaling and exhaling and the one cannot be conceived without the other, so
also the whole of Creation constitutes a gigantic process of divine inhalation
and exhalation.’48 I would modify Scholem’s view by noting that it is not only
that the “perpetual tension” of the cosmic process entails that every expansion
(hitpashsheṭut) is preceded by withdrawal (histallequt), but rather, more para-
doxically, that the expansion is itself a withdrawal in the same manner that
every disclosure (gilluy) is a concealment (heʿlem), since what is disclosed is the
concealment and the concealment cannot be disclosed as concealment unless
it is concealed. The concentration of the limitless to a delimited space is per-
force an attenuation of the limitlessness. Every creative act of the infinite must
be seen through the prism of this twofold process, although I must emphasize
again that the two processes occur contemporaneously and not consecutively.
The same paradox should be applied to the relationship of the divine to
nature: the constriction of infinity in the form of the finite is commensurate
to the extension of the finite into the formlessness of infinity. Alternately
expressed, the spatio-temporal world is the disclosure of the light of Ein Sof
to the extent that the light is concealed therein, and hence the meontological
nothingness of infinity becomes the ontic somethingness of finitude just as the
ontic somethingness of finitude is restored to the meontological nothingness of
infinity. The aforementioned terms—pantheism and panentheism, and I might
add, acosmism—do not adequately express the depth of the secret enunciated
by the kabbalistic masters: the cosmos both is and is not divinity, infinity both is
and is not revealed by the finite, revealed as that which is not revealed and not
revealed as that which is revealed. The transcendent, therefore, is present in the
world to the degree that it is absent from the world; indeed, the transcendent is
present precisely as that which is absent. My contention is that, for Böhme as
145. In the final analysis, we are justified to ask if anything can be meaningfully marked as
wholly dissimilar in a system wherein all things proceed from an original monad and thus
are conjoined with or participate in the imparticipable one.
47 Scholem, Major Trends, 261; idem, On Jews and Judaism, 283. Concerning Scholem’s ap-
proach to the doctrine of ṣimṣum, see Wohlfarth, ‘Haarscharf’.
48 Scholem, Major Trends, 263. See Wolfson, ‘Divine Suffering’, 114–115.

well, the apophatic entanglement49 of God and world generates the paradox
of the identity and difference between the divine and nature: nature is God
insofar as God is not nature.
Ungrund, Theopoetic Desire, and Autogenesis of the Other
A number of scholars have drawn attention to the similarity of the Ungrund

in Böhme’s theosophy and the kabbalistic Ein Sof.50 For my purposes, I would
like to assess that conceptual correspondence by focusing on the philosophi-
cal problem of alterity and the all-encompassing infinite ground. Simply put,
how does one account for difference when the infinite comprises even its
own opposite as the nonidentity of its selfsame identity? Expressed somewhat
more technically, kabbalists conceive of infinity as the absolute negation of
the negation of the absolute, the nondifferentiated indifference wherein all
difference is annihilated, the pure void, neither nothing nor something, oscil-
lating between the presence of absence and the absence of presence. The
infinite, on this score, is the nothingness that cannot be constricted by either
images of affirmation or negation, the inchoate essence that has no essence,
the being that is otherwise to the otherwise than being.51 Appropriating the
language that Derrida deployed to summarize the view of Levinas, we can refer
to Ein Sof as the “infinitely-other”, which ‘cannot be bound by a concept, can-
not be thought on the basis of a horizon; for a horizon is always a horizon
of the same, the elementary unity within which eruptions and surprises are
always welcomed by understanding and recognized’.52 However, inasmuch as
Ein Sof is portrayed as the source in which all things are contained, it follows
that it must comprehend the other as part of itself. Difference, accordingly,
is incorporated in the sameness of the other that is differently the same, and
hence the oneness of being would have to embrace the truth that being is not
one.
49 The expression is used by Keller, Cloud, 333 n. 75, in her gloss on my comment that, for
Nicholas of Cusa, God both is and is not identical with the world. See Wolfson, Language,
30–31.
50 Martensen, Jacob Boehme, 123; Paslick, ‘The Ontological Context’, 409–413; Schulitz, Jakob
Böhme, 47–82; Deghaye, De Paracelse à Thomas Mann, 83–84, 120–121; Hessayon, ‘Boehme’s
Life’, 31; Aubrey, ‘The Influence’, 36–37; Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia Perennis, 119.
51 Wolfson, Giving, 78.
52 Derrida, Writing, 95.

36 wolfson
In an alternate terminological register, the philosophical quandary relates

to the problem of evil.53 If we must say with respect to the infinite, as the
thirteenth-century kabbalist, Azriel of Gerona, put it, there is nothing outside it
(ein ḥuṣ mimmennu),54 then darkness itself is a facet of light, or in the language
of the Idra Rabba, one of the most recondite sections of the zoharic compila-
tion, the supreme aspect of the divine is “entirely right”,55 which is to say, the
left is not accorded autonomy because it is included within the right.56 The
eschatological implication of this orientation would necessitate the restora-
tion of the unholy to the holy. At times, the ideal of restitution is affirmed by
kabbalists, but at other times, and frequently by the same individuals, the mes-
sianic goal is depicted as the eradication of the demonic. Even the kabbalists,
who deliberately sought to avoid the problem of dualism, and thus emphasized
that the realm of impurity derives from the realm of purity rather than being
coeval with it, are nonetheless challenged by the inference that evil is an inher-
ent property of the Godhead.
We find a similar struggle between the monistic and dualistic approaches to
evil in Böhme. Let me begin with the formulation offered by him in Aurora,
after he presents a parable wherein the garden signifies the world, the field
nature, the trunk of the tree the stars, the branches the elements, the fruits
the human beings, and the sap the clear divinity (die klare Gottheit):
Yet nature possesses two qualities and will do so until the Judgment of
God: a pleasing, good, celestial, and holy one and a fierce, hellish, and
thirsty one. Now the good quality perpetually manifests, laboring as hard
as it can to bring forth good fruit. In it the Holy Spirit prevails lending it
sap and life. The evil quality likewise surges and drives as hard as it can to
53 Many scholars have discussed the role of evil in kabbalistic symbolism. I will mention here
some representative studies: Tishby, The Doctrine of Evil; idem, The Wisdom of the Zohar,
447–474; Scholem, On the Mystical Shape, 56–87; Idel, ‘The Evil Thought’; idem, Il male
primordiale; Wolfson, ‘Left Contained’, and ‘Light Through Darkness’ (revised versions
appear in Wolfson, Luminal Darkness, 1–55); Farber-Ginat, ‘The Shell’; Jacobson, ‘The
Problem of Evil’; Har-Shefi, The Myth of the Edomite Kings; Berman, “‘Improper Twins’”;
Yisraeli, ‘Cain’.
54 Azriel of Gerona, Beʾur Eser Sefirot, 81.
55 Zohar 3:129a. Concerning this passage, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 218–219, and more
recently, Hellner-Eshed, Seekers of the Face, 189.
56 The implication of the zoharic text is made explicit by Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 13:13, 68c: ‘Thus it
is known that in Attiqa Qaddisha there is no left for it is entirely right as is mentioned in
the Idra of Naso, and the two aspects are considered as one’.

yield evil fruit. The devil lends it sap and hellish fire. Both these qualities
are in the tree of nature, and human beings have been made out of the
tree … This means that if the human being lifts his spirit into the divinity,
the Holy Spirit surges and qualifies in him; but if he allows his spirit to
descend into this world, into the lust for evil, then what prevails in him is
the devil and his hellish sap.57
The antithetical properties are ascribed to nature, but the latter, as Böhme
makes explicit, ‘cannot be distinguished from the powers of God. It is all a
single body. The divinity, which is the holy power of the heart of God, is born
in nature’.58 From the identification of nature and the body of God—in some
contexts, natura is aligned more specifically with the seventh source spirit59—
we should assume that both forces are equally part of the divine economy.
Reminiscent of the kabbalistic depiction of Ein Sof, Böhme writes: ‘The father
is everything and every force abides in the father: he is the beginning and the
end of all things; and there is nothing outside of him [vnd ausser ihm ist nichts].
Moreover, everything that has come into being has arisen from the father. …
All things must have their cause or root. Otherwise there would be nothing’.60
From this it logically follows that what is seemingly in conflict with the divine
must be part of its essence. In another passage of this treatise, Böhme identifies
the ‘devil’s eternal inflamed dwelling of anger’ as God’s wrath.61 The affinity
between Böhme’s identifying the origin of evil as God’s rage and the kabbalistic
symbolism concerning the divine quality of judgement on the left whence the
demonic realm comes to be was duly noted by Scholem.62 I would bolster this
comparison by noting that Böhme’s view that the creative process is sparked by
the dark core of divinity, insofar as the devouring fire evolves from the desire
(Begierde) and hunger of the Ungrund to give itself a ground,63 corresponds
precisely to the kabbalistic presumption that the element of constraint in
the Godhead fosters the munificence of love, that feminine judgment arouses
masculine grace.
The eternal will of the abyss, as Böhme put it in Sex puncta theosophica
(1620), ‘desires to manifest itself from its own ground in the light of Majesty’,

58 Ibid., 690–691.
59 Ibid., 384–385.
60 Ibid., 150–151.
61 Ibid., 538–539.
62 Scholem, Major Trends, 237.
63 Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 9; Sämtliche Schriften, 7:12.

38 wolfson
a desire that draws itself as there is nothing extrinsic that can be drawn,64 the
craving (Sucht) that stimulates the becoming of the other within the center of
the will as the contra-will (Wiederwille).65 In his Ein gründlicher Bericht (1620)
on the celestial and terrestrial mysteries, Böhme explicated the theme of the
will of the Ungrund to give itself a ground—what Ray L. Hart felicitously has
called the “abyssal indeterminate desire”66—in more detail:
The abyss is an eternal nothing, which nonetheless fashions an eternal

beginning that amounts to a craving. For the nothing is a craving after
something [eine Sucht nach etwas]. Yet since there is nothing there that
could give it something, the craving itself is the giving of that which is
constituted as nothing but a mere covetous craving. This is the eternal
precondition of the magic that creates within itself where there is noth-
ing. Out of the nothing it makes something, doing so only in itself [sie
machet aus nichts etwas und das nur in sich selber]. Since this craving is,
however, nothing but a mere will, it has nothing. There is nothing to give it
anything. Nor does it have any place to abide or repose. Now since there is
a craving in the nothing, it constitutes for itself the will toward something.
This will is a spirit [ein Geist] that proceeds as a thought [ein Gedanken]
out of the craving. It is the craver in the craving. For what it finds is its
mother which is the craving.67
The eternal beginning, which issues timelessly from the eternal nothing, is
branded as the craving for something. But since there is no something in the
nothing, the craving is itself the giving of what is constituted as nothing but the
craving. Implicitly, creatio ex nihilo is transposed into creatio ex deo: the nothing
64 Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 12; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:9.

65 Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 11; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:8. The roots for this mythopoeic
notion are much older. Consider, for example. the characterization of noetic desire as the
impulse for the mind to procreate in the Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus, Enneads, iv.7.1 in
the Theology of Aristotle, 219: ‘When the mind acquires a desire, it proceeds because of that
desire in a certain direction and does not abide in its original place, for it desires greatly to
act and to adorn the things which it has seen in the mind. Like the woman who has conceived
and to whom the birth-pangs have come, so that she may bring forth what is in her womb,
so, when the mind is informed with the form of desire, it desires to bring out into actuality
the form that is in it, and it longs greatly for that, and the birth-pangs seize it and it brings
it (the form) forth into actuality because of its desire for the sensible world’ (emphasis in
original).
66 Hart, God Being Nothing, 80.
67 The German text and English translation are printed in Boehme, Aurora, 796–797.

whence the world is created is the infinite nothingness, and the rapacious
will toward something in that nothing comports as the spirit that proceeds as
thought, the craver in the craving, which is gendered as the mother.
The notion of the will for the other in that which has no other—the other
that is separate from and yet part of the all-inclusive self—resembles the kab-
balistic conception of shaʿashuʿa, the autoerotic stirrings of Ein Sof to extend
phallically into the space of the other.68 Hart’s summary of Böhme’s theopoiesis
of desire69 is astoundingly close to the idea of jouissance that kabbalists impute
to the initial act of the infinite to emanate and to establish itself as the ground:
Desire is Böhme’s most comprehensive term for the restless fermentation

or effervescence that comprises the internal force field of the wholly inter-
nal life of God, as turba (from Greek τυρβα: confusion, disorder, chaos)
is the term most often used by him to characterize the simultaneity of
creativeness and destruction in the indeterminate abyss of Godhead (the
Ungrund). We spoke of the determination process, the nonserial pro-
gression from indeterminate Ungrund through Abgrund to determinate
Grund. … For Böhme desire as a concupi-scienta is a totalizing preknow-
ing of longing itself, insusceptible of compunction, and that because it is
compact of both anticipation and remorse, a concupiscence not yet suf-
ficiently determinate to be erotically sexual. What is yearned and longed
for is what is lacked, what is wanted, what is not there. What desire in and
out and of itself yields is, effectively, nothing.70
The kabbalists are more emphatic in the use of sexual and erotic images to
characterize the desire of Ein Sof, but for them as well that pleasure is noetic
in nature, and thus it corresponds to Böhme’s identification of the will as
spirit that comes forth as thought. In the kabbalistic and Böhmean mythos, the
object of contemplation is the lack within the fullness, the site of the recoil
that yields that which both is and is not the infinite, or in Hart’s terms, the
determinateness of the indeterminate Godhead.71 Moreover, just as Böhme
depicts the desire of the Ungrund as the simultaneity of the creativeness of
love and the destructiveness of wrath, the centrum naturae, the hinge (Angel)
68 For translation and analysis of some of the relevant sources, see Wolfson, Circle, 69–72,
189–192 nn. 174–180; idem, Language, 271–287; idem, Alef, 135–136; and most recently,
idem, ‘Phallic Jewissance’.
69 Hart, God Being Nothing, 83.
70 Ibid., 81 (emphasis in original).
71 Ibid., 88–89.

40 wolfson
between light and darkness,72 so the kabbalists characterize the shaʿashuʿa of

Ein Sof as the attribute of judgment, the capacity to constrict, that arouses the
attribute of lovingkindness, the impulse to overflow.
I cannot establish with certainty the historical or textual intermediary by
which one of the boldest mythologoumena propagated by the kabbalists made
its way into Böhme’s theosophic mysticism, but the resemblance is remarkable.
Let me offer a few of numerous textual examples to illustrate the point. The
affinity to the kabbalistic shaʿashuʿa, which results in the compression of light
into the darkness of the vessel, is conspicuous in Böhme’s words in Sex puncta
theosophica:
God, however, desires only light, viz. the lustre from his heart, that he may
shine forth in wisdom, and the whole God thus be manifest in himself,
and by the forth-going Spirit out of himself, in the virgin of his wisdom;
and that there be an eternal perfect joy, delight and satisfaction in him.
… We now consider Desire, and find that it is a stringent removal [ein
strenges Unziehen],73 like an eternal elevation or motion. For it draws
itself into itself, and makes itself pregnant, so that from the thin freedom
where there is nothing a darkness is produced. For the desiring will
becomes by the drawing-in [Einziehen] thick and full, although there is
nothing but darkness. … Thus the will draws more strongly into itself
[zeucht der Wille je mehr in sich], and its pregnancy becomes the greater,
and yet the darkness cannot comprehend the centre of the word or heart
of the ternary; for this centre is a degree deeper in itself, and yet is a band.
But the first will, in which the gestation of Nature takes place, is deeper
still than the centre of the word, for it arises from the eternal Unground
or Nothing; and thus the centre of the heart is shut up in the midst, the
first will of the Father labouring in the birth of fire.74
In an uncanny similarity to the jouissance that kabbalists attributed to the infi-

nite, the yearning of the boundless will to expand, which is occasioned by the
primordial withdrawal (ṣimṣum), Böhme speaks of the desire of the Ungrund as
a “stringent removal”, a drawing into itself, a retreat to the center, which results
in the pregnancy and the birthing of the fire.75 Böhme’s words from Dreyfachen
72 Böhme, Six Mystical Points, in Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 119–120; Sämtliche Schriften,
4:85.
73 I have modified the translation (see following note for reference) from “a stern attraction”.
74 Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 13–15; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:9–10.
75 Paslick, ‘The Ontological Context’, 411–412, interprets Böhme’s theosophy dialectically in

Leben des Menschen (1620) read like a perfect précis of the kabbalistic paradox
of the appearance of the inapparent in the circumscription of infinity:
For the vast infinite space desireth narrowness and inclosure [or compre-
hension] [Einfasslichkeit] wherein it may manifest itself, for else in the
wide stillness there would be no manifestation; therefore there must be
an attraction [Unziehen] and inclosing [Einschliessen], out of which the
manifestation appeareth; and therefore also there must be a contrary will
[Wiederwille]; for a transparent and quiet will is as nothing, and gener-
ateth nothing: but if a will must generate, then it must be in somewhat
wherein it may form and may generate in that thing; for Nothing is noth-
ing but a stillness without any stirring, where there is neither darkness nor
light, neither life nor death.76
As the kabbalists, who expounded Luria’s teaching, Böhme maintained that

expansion is consequent to contraction, that the explosion is precipitated by
the kenotic retraction:
The will which is called Father, which has freedom in itself, so generates
itself in Nature …. The terror of Nature is a kindler of fire. For when the
dark anguish [die finstere Angst], as the very fervent, stern being, receives
freedom in itself, it is transformed in the terror, in freedom, into a flash
[einen Blitz], and the flash embraces freedom or gentleness. Then the
sting of death is broken; and there rises in Nature the other will of the
Father, which he drew prior to Nature in the mirror of wisdom [Spiegel
der Weisheit], viz. his heart of love, the desire of love, the kingdom of joy.
For in the Father’s will fire is thus generated, to which the other will gives
the power of gentleness and love.77
Lurianic terms: the grounding of the Ungrund proceeds through an act of contraction
or the clearing of a space—identified as nature or the dark world of the divine—within
itself but not of itself. On the dialectic of contraction and attraction in the psychology
of desire in Böhme and Oetinger, see Deghaye, ‘La Philosophie sacrée’, 261–263, 265–266.
The resemblance of Böhme’s account of the desire of the infinite space of the abyss for
narrowness and enclosure to manifest itself and the kabbalistic doctrine of ṣimṣum was
also noted by Aubrey, ‘The Influence’, 112–113, and see the suggestion of Hart, God Being
Nothing, 89.
76 Boehme, The Threefold Life of Man, 14 (emphasis in original); Sämtliche Schriften, 3:11.
77 Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 18; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:13.

42 wolfson
Light and dark, love and anguish, are differentiated in virtue of their identity
in the will of the primordial nothing that is prior to all opposition, since it
evinces the twofoldness of an irreducible duality, the quality, above all else,
that justifies the characterization of the nonground as the absolute indifference
beyond the dyad of being and nonbeing.78 In Schelling’s enunciation, likely
provoked by his reading of Böhme, the infinite will exhibits the concurrence
as opposed to the coincidence of opposites; the former entails a difference of
identity (a + b), the latter an identity of difference (a = b).79
The twofold nature of the abyss is described succinctly in De electione gra-
tiae: ‘For God knows the will of the Unground, how it has formed itself into a
ground and manifested itself, whether it be a root out of the dark fire-life or a
root out of the shining fire-life’.80 Böhme elaborates on this theme in Mysterium
Magnum:
The anguish-source is thus to be understood: The astringent desire con-

ceiveth itself, and draweth itself into itself, and maketh itself full, hard
and rough: now the attraction is an enemy of the hardness. The hard-
ness is retentive, the attraction is fugitive: the one will into itself, and
the other will out of itself; but since they cannot sever and part asun-
der one from the other they remain in each other as a rotating wheel: the
one will ascend, the other descend. … We acknowledge that God in his
own essence is no essence [das Gott in seinem eigenen Wesen kein Wesen
ist] but only the alone power or the understanding to the essence, viz. an
unsearchable eternal will, wherein all things are couched; and the same
is all, and yet is only one, but yet desireth to manifest itself, and intro-
duce itself into a spiritual essence, which is effected in the power of the
light, through the fire in the love-desire. … The holy spiritual love-desire,
where the holy will of God hath sharpened itself in the harsh impression,
and manifested itself through the fire with the power of the omnipotence,
that now brings itself forth through the fire in the light; and so in the pow-
ers it is introduced into life and motion, in the desire; and herein the holy
78 Boehme, The Signature, 13–14; Sämtliche Schriften, 6:9–10; and compare Boehme, The
Signature, 22; Sämtliche Schriften, 6:18.
79 Schelling, The Ages, 15; Die Weltalter, 223. For a representative sampling of studies chroni-
cling Böhme’s impact on Schelling, see Benz, Schellings theologische Geistesahnen; Brown,
The Later Philosophy; Schulte, ‘F.W.J. Schellings Ausleihe’, 267–277; Vieillard-Baron, ‘Schel-
ling et Jacob Böhme’, 223–242; Mayer, Jena Romanticism, 179–221; Whistler, ‘Silvering’, 160–
167.
80 Boehme, De Electione Gratiae, 173; Sämtliche Schriften, 6:145.

generation, and the triumphant kingdom of the great love of God, doth
consist, and is manifest. … The Father is first the will of the abyss: he is
outside of all nature or beginnings: the will to something; which will doth
conceive itself into a lubet [Lust] to its own manifestation. And the lubet
is the conceived power of the will, or of the Father, and it is his Son, heart,
and seat: the first eternal beginning in the will. And he is therefore called
a Son, because he receiveth an eternal beginning in the will, with the will’s
self-conception.81
The austerity, astringency, and compunctive sharpness of the divine wrath cou-
pled with the meekness, suppleness, and capaciousness of divine love enkin-
dles “a great flagrat” (ein grosser Schrack), which is likened to a flash of lightning
(ein Blitz).82 In one of the more daring passages in Aurora, Böhme proclaims
the deep mystery of the unity of these two forces:
I am going to tell you a secret [ein geheimnis]. The time has come for the
bridegroom to crown his bride. Guess, dear fellow, where is the crown to
be found? Toward midnight [Kegen Mitternacht]. For in the midst of the
stringent quality, it is growing light [Den mitten in der Herben qualitet /
wird das licht Helle]. Whence issues the bridegroom? From the middle,
where the heat gives birth to the light, shooting toward midnight into the
stringent quality. That is where the light is growing bright.83
In language that resonates with the myth of the hieros gamos central to kabbal-
istic symbolism, most typically related to the union of the sixth and the tenth
emanations, Tifʾeret and Malkhut, Böhme associates the secret to the crowning
of the bride by the bridegroom, a euphemism for the intercourse of Christ and
Sophia, the reconstituted image of the androgynous Adam.84 The crown, we are
told, is to be found in proximity to midnight, the time when the light begins to
grow. Symbolically, the middle of the night, the heart of darkness, is when the
stringent quality—kabbalistically, the attribute of judgment—prevails, and the
heat gives birth to the light. Notwithstanding Böhme’s insistence that the will of
the abyss is the one source for the heat and the light, he is unambiguous about
the antipathy of the divine to the demonic. Hence, in the context of emphasiz-
ing that everything in heaven and on earth proceeds from God, he admonishes
81 Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 12, 28–36; Sämtliche Schriften, 7:14–15, 29–37.

84 On the role of gender in Böhme’s theosophy, see Gibbons, Gender, 89–102, and esp. 96–97.

44 wolfson
the reader, ‘You should not conclude from this that evil and good surge or abide
in God. Rather God is the good itself [Gott ist Selber das Gutte] and derives his
name from the good’.85 One might protest that if all comes from God, a case
can be made that God should be considered the causal agent of evil as well.
This would not necessarily mean, however, that God appropriates evil in the
same manner that the good is appropriated: ‘Thus can one indeed know that
God does not want evil but rather wants that his kingdom come and that his
way hold sway, in heaven as on earth’.86 The theosophic axiom that gentleness
is the core of divinity (der kern der Gottheit)87 is the underpinning for Böhme’s
ethical directive that the knowledge that there is good and evil in nature should
motivate individuals to flee from the latter and to abide in the former.88 Human
freedom is dependent on the possibility to choose between the paths of light
and darkness, but that choice rests on the metaphysical discrimination that the
light is antithetical to the darkness, even though at the most sublime level, one
detects that darkness is a feature of light—diagrammed as the dot in the cen-
ter of a circle—the ember that incites the conflagration of nature wherein the
hidden God is manifest.89
In subsequent works, Böhme returns to this theme and the two forces are
attributed more directly to the divine. Consider the opening paragraphs of De
tribus principiis (1619): God is identified as the “Essence of all Essences” (das
Wesen aller Wesen), and hence ‘all is generated or born, created and proceeded
from him’.90 This would imply that good and evil are both ascribable to God.
Still, there is a discrepancy or asymmetry, inasmuch as ‘Evil neither is, nor
is called God; this is understood in the first Principle, where it is the earnest
Fountain of the Wrathfulness, according to which, God calls himself an angry,
wrathful, zealous God. For the original of Life, and of all Mobility, consists in
the Wrathfulness; yet if the tartness be kindled with the Light of God, it is
then no more Tartness, but the severe Wrathfulness is changed into great Joy’.91
Proverbially, Böhme wants to have his cake and eat it too. On the one hand, he
demarcates God as the source of both good and evil, but, on the other hand, he
does not identify or name the latter as divine. Nevertheless, the first principle
is the fountain of wrathfulness in addition to being the source of beneficence,

86 Ibid., 80–81.
87 Ibid., 252–253.
88 Ibid., 84–85.
90 Boehme, The Three Principles, 13; Sämtliche Schriften, 2:9.
91 Behmen, The Three Principles, 13; Sämtliche Schriften, 2:9.

and thus God is characterized as angry, wrathful, and zealous. The dualism is
mitigated by the claim that when the fury is ignited by the light, it is transposed
into joy. The tension between the two perspectives comes to the fore in Böhme’s
assertion:
Indeed there is no difference in God, only when it is enquired from

whence Evil and Good proceed, it is to be known, what is the first and
original fountain of Anger, and also of Love, since they both proceed
from one and the same Original, out of one Mother, and are one Thing. …
Therefore the Source or Fountain of the Cause must be sought, viz. what
is the Prima Materia, or first matter of Evil, and that in the Originality of
God as well as in the Creatures; for it is all but one only Thing in the Origin:
All is out of God, made out of his Essence, according to the Trinity, as he
is one in Essence and threefold in Persons.92
The friction is repeated in many of Böhme’s writings including the following

passage in the treatise “Von der Wahren Gelassenheit” (1622) included in Der
Weg zu Christo:
God is all. He is darkness and light, love and wrath, fire and light. But
He calls Himself only God according to the light of His love. There is an
eternal contrarium between darkness and light. Neither grasps the other,
and neither is the other. And yet there is only one being, but separated by
the source and by the will. Yet it is not a divided being, but one principium
divides it so that each is in the other as a nothing. But it is there, although
not revealed in the characteristic of that which it is.93
God is all and thus he is both dark and light, love and wrath, and yet, the
godliness of God relates exclusively to the light of his love. As Böhme states
unequivocally in another passage from this work, ‘God, insofar as He is and is
called God, can will no evil; for in God there is only one single will and that is
eternal love, a desire for similarity [Gleichheit], as for power, beauty and virtue.
God desires nothing but what is like His desire. His desire accepts nothing
except that which itself is’.94 In psychoanalytic terms, God’s love is a narcissistic
desire for the same, which leads to the tautological statement that God desires
92 Behmen, The Three Principles, 14; Sämtliche Schriften, 2:10.

93 Boehme, The Way to Christ, 126–127; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:98–99.
94 Boehme, The Way to Christ, 130; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:102.

46 wolfson
nothing but that which is like his desire, and hence nature is the image of the
imageless confabulated in the mirror of the imagination as the imagelessness
of the image.
Mystery is nothing else than the magical will, which still lies caught in
desire. It may fashion itself in the mirror of wisdom how it will. … For the
Mysterium magnum is nothing else than the hiddenness of the Deity [die
Verborgenheit der Gottheit], together with the Being of all beings [mit dem
Wesen aller Wesen], from which one mysterium proceeds after another,
and each mysterium is the mirror and model of the other.95
Again, we note the astonishing affinity to the kabbalists for whom the potential
for otherness is enfolded in the undifferentiated sameness of infinity that
unfolds with each being mirroring uniquely what has preceded it. Translated
ontologically, there is only one will that divides into a polarity, but each term
of that diversification is in its other as a nothing.
The more radical dualistic dimension in Böhme’s thought leads him in some
passages to classify the corporal creation as the expression of demonic wrath.
Consider the following passage in De triplici vita hominis (1620): ‘Before time
[was], the world was in God, but without substance [In Gott ist die Welt gewesen
vor der Zeit, aber ohne Wesen]: Now Lucifer, the great prince out of the centre
of nature, awakened and kindled the wrath and fire, which was not known
in the eternity; for he would domineer in the might of the fire, above God,
and therefore the source of fire became his habitation’.96 Prima facie, Böhme’s
language is perplexing: that time is dependent on the existence of the physical
world is a well-known philosophical posture, but what does it mean to say
that the world was in God without substance? Presumably, what is intended
is that the concrete substantiality of the cosmos is dependent on its material
nature, and this, in turn, is tied causally to the dark fire of Lucifer erupting from
the center of nature. This marks a departure from the kabbalistic perspective.
To be sure, on occasion, we do find negative assessments of the corporeal—a
tendency that is reflective of the wider medieval milieu in which the kabbalah
flourished historically—but we do not find a straightforward identification of
the world as the habitation of the demonic. At best, we can say kabbalists
forged a connection between the divine attribute of judgment and nature—an
95 Böhme, Six Mystical Points, 136; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:96.

96 Boehme, The High and Deep Searching, 149 (emphasis in original); Sämtliche Schriften,
3:99.

idea sometimes expressed by the numerical equivalence of the words elohim

and ha-ṭeva, that is, both have the sum of 86—but this falls short of the view
endorsed by Böhme.
Bracketing this crucial divergence, the convergences between Böhmean the-
osophy and kabbalistic symbolism are impressive. Like the masters of the kab-
balah, Böhme sought to explain the eternal becoming of God by reference to
the process by which the all-encompassing nonground of being, which is noth-
ing, grounds itself through the activation of the dark core in the divinity that is
and yet is not God. The darkness contracting into light engenders the expansion
of that light into the constricted forms of the determinate beings that make up
the world. Nature is thus the self-limitation of the infinite expanse and uncon-
ditional self-positing I, which divides into the I and not-I. The unconditioned
I may posit the not-I out of its own covetousness, which is the quintessence
of the freedom commensurate to the vacuity of the plenum, but the ques-
tion that perseveres is whether this not-I can procure an authentic sense of
alterity. Within an emanative-monistic scheme, is it possible for the other not
to be reduced to an aspect of the same? How can we speak of a will that
is genuinely contrary to the will when the latter comprehends the other as
part of its not-otherness? Even if we acknowledge that the infinitivity of the
Ungrund or the Ein Sof can be distillated only as transfinite or as an increasable
actual-infinite—an unbounded succession of ordinal numbers whose unity
is formed by an indefinite division beyond mathematical determination—it
is still germane to say that the absolute minimum is the absolute maximum,
that the magnitude of the infinitesimal comprehends everything incompre-
hensibly and therefore is incapable of increase or diminution.97 The Böhmean
and kabbalistic response would be that the otherness of the not-other implies
that the infinite is identical with the finite precisely because the finite is not
identical with the infinite. The shared paradox opens the way to envisage
through the imagination—the temporal mirror of eternity—that difference is
the property of the indifferent and multiplicity the instantiation of the singu-
lar.
97 My analysis is indebted to the discussion of Cantor’s absolute infinity and the transfinite
in Priest, Beyond the Limits, 113–127, esp. 115–117.

48 wolfson
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The Holy Cabala of Changes

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The Holy Cabala of Changes

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Aries – Journal for the Study

of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

The Holy Cabala of Changes

Tetragrammaton – Ungrund – Ein Sof – sefirot – imagination – desire

Scholars have long noted the possibility of a vestige of kabbalistic ideas in

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Mystery of the Tetragrammaton and the Powers of God

I will commence my examination by taking stock of the occasional hints in

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

11 Boehme, The Key, 17; Sämtliche Schriften, 9:77.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

15 Boehme, The Key, 22; Sämtliche Schriften, 9:81–82.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

an angry, jealous God, and a consuming Fire, as well as a merciful God,

The more specific influence of the Christian kabbalistic understanding of the

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Once again, the influence of kabbalistic theosophy is readily apparent in the

21 Boehme, De Electione Gratiae and Quaestiones Theosophicae, 286–287 (translation slightly

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Incarnation, Angelic Body, and the Sophianic Mirror

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

A similar theme is noted in the reference to the kabbalah in a second passage

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Discernible in Böhme’s kingdom of joy is an echo of the kabbalistic symbol of

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Moreover, as the kabbalists universally applied to the sefirot the dictum of

33 Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, § 6, 74.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

40 Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 33–34; Sämtliche Schriften, 7:34.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Correlating his kabbalistically-inflected theosophy with the Christian doctrine

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

no doubt influenced by an articulation of this sort, emphasized that the incep-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Ungrund, Theopoetic Desire, and Autogenesis of the Other

A number of scholars have drawn attention to the similarity of the Ungrund

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

In an alternate terminological register, the philosophical quandary relates

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

57 Boehme, Aurora, 78–79.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

The abyss is an eternal nothing, which nonetheless fashions an eternal

64 Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 12; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:9.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Desire is Böhme’s most comprehensive term for the restless fermentation

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

between light and darkness,72 so the kabbalists characterize the shaʿashuʿa of

In an uncanny similarity to the jouissance that kabbalists attributed to the infi-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

As the kabbalists, who expounded Luria’s teaching, Böhme maintained that

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

The anguish-source is thus to be understood: The astringent desire con-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

81 Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 12, 28–36; Sämtliche Schriften, 7:14–15, 29–37.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

85 Boehme, Aurora, 138–139.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

Indeed there is no difference in God, only when it is enquired from

The friction is repeated in many of Böhme’s writings including the following

92 Behmen, The Three Principles, 14; Sämtliche Schriften, 2:10.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

95 Böhme, Six Mystical Points, 136; Sämtliche Schriften, 4:96.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 21–53

idea sometimes expressed by the numerical equivalence of the words elohim